Szelc is 34 years old and still not a graduate of the famed Łódź Film School. And yet, her debut feature was not only enthusiastically produced by the school-owned Studio Indeks (originally established by Wojciech Jerzy Has, of “The Saragossa Manuscript” fame), but also landed two key awards at Poland’s prime domestic showcase, Gdynia Film Festival (Best Feature Debut, Best Screenplay).
The film itself is a psychological horror of sorts, opening with a “Shining”-like series of overhead shots of a lonely car exiting rigid geometry of urban space and plunging into the unbridled, mountainous beauty of Poland’s Lower Silesia region. The main dramatic conflict is established right away, as we meet two sisters—Mula (Anna Krotoska) and Kaja (Małgorzata Szczerbowska)— who may physically resemble one another, but seem to inhabit opposite ends of a spiritual spectrum the movie’s chief concern is to fearlessly examine.
When we first see Mula, she is building a makeshift wire fence around a young tree in her country house’s yard—a gesture implying strife for control and order in a world escaping categorization. It’s only a few days left before Mula’s daughter, Nina (Laila Hennessy) will receive her First Communion, which provokes a family get-together that serves as a blissful early-May sojourn for Mula’s overworked, lower middle class family. The half-dozen adults and three kids (two of which are played by the actual children of actors playing Mula’s brother and sister-in-law, Rafał Kwietniewski and Dorota Łukasiewicz-Kwietniewska) mostly walk freely around nature, dine together and enjoy many a lazy breakfast in a sunny living room—or else pay a short and awkward visit to Mula’s immobilized mother (Anna Zubrzycki), residing in an upstairs room. Into all this comes Kaja: silent, ethereal and slightly menacing from her very first scene, in which she stares blankly into the camera as if attuned to sounds no one else is hearing. As the film almost immediately establishes, Kaja is in fact Nina’s biological mother, who for the past six years might have been institutionalized and whose strange behavior is an embarrassment for the straight-laced wannabe-bourgeois family. It is through Kaja’s disconcerting presence that the family will be tested, and ultimately transformed, in "Tower. A Bright Day."
On face value, the film plays like a Dogma 95-inspired riff on the theme of possible witchcraft and/or paranoia subtly gnawing at a seemingly self-possessed character of Mula. Szelc and her editor Anna Garncarczyk beautifully establish not only the moment-to-moment rhythm of the scenes (heavy on jump-cuts and yet astonishingly fluent), but also the cyclical nature of what basically is carefree vacation time, punctuated by intense dream images that haunt Mula practically every night. Mula’s repeating of everyday rituals (the morning check-up on the sleeping kids, fixing breakfast, etc.) acquire a subtly sinister nature as the feeling grows inside her mind that Kaja is dead-set on somehow subverting the family order: be it by performing an actual miracle of healing, or by turning Nina away from Catholicism and pulling her into some pagan-like sensibility Mula intensely fears.
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